August 19th-22nd 2011 :: Theme: Escape
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Stop the flies escaping your web!
Use the arrow keys to control the spider as it captures the flies that land in its web. If a fly is allowed to struggle for too long, it'll break free and you'll lose. Damaged web will slowly repair itself whenever the spider is nearby.
Recommended browser: Chrome (Firefox and Safari will also work, but may struggle a bit.)
My first Ludum Dare entry - an entire game as a single SVG image. Progress was a little slow while I figured out the quirks of the medium, but it came together in the end :)
All graphics and interface components drawn in Inkscape; animation and game logic in JavaScript. Enjoy!
Downloads and Links
Ratings
| #122 | Innovation | 3.33 |
| #207 | Graphics | 2.89 |
| #212 | Theme | 3.11 |
| #318 | Overall | 2.67 |
| #349 | Audio | 1.14 |
| #376 | Fun | 2.17 |
| #418 | Coolness | 0% |
| #441 | Humor | 1.14 |
Comments
Framerate was pretty low. Not sure why. Could see this as a good iPhone game.
Innovation: New ideas. I've seen similar things, but nothing quite like this.
Theme: It fits the theme, that is all.
Graphics: Everything looked like what it represented, and the UI had a nice clean look. My only suggestion is to maybe texture the web a bit and reduce the shaking effect.
Fun: Unfortunately, due to the nature of this game, it felt like a chore. Maybe adding some sort of way to move faster, or things to dodge, you could make this more interesting. Also, I didn't seem to be able to repair my web.
Overall: The gameplay needs some more work in the fun department, but everything else was pretty much spot-on. Good work!
Using a single svg image to make a game is interesting technically, but the gameplay was a bit slow and tedious for me. I agree quite a bit with Cosine, and with some tweaks to the movement speed and adding a tradeoff between building your web and consuming flies there could be some fun directions to take this.
The spider felt a bit low while the flies seemed to rip through the web at the power of ten suns, a little speed balancing can improve that.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! Sorry about the imbalances in the gameplay - my decision to actually submit occurred relatively late in the comp (I had a lot on my plate that weekend), and gameplay was so radically modified in the last 6-hour push to get something out the door I didn't really have time to retweak parameters.
It was largely a proof-of-concept of the SVG game idea (LD seems like a good opportunity for this kind of experimentation), so in that context I'm rather happy with it, and (now that I have a bit of a handle on the medium) I'm quite looking forward to pushing things further next LD.
@Reelix: You beat me - 31 :P
@mpc174: It's probably the calculation of the web distortion. My original algorithm brought Chrome crashing to its knees; the current version is much simpler, but still pretty intensive. I suspect browsers aren't really optimised for this sort of thing - I tried it in Firefox after the comp, and was also a little disappointed by the frame rate.
@Cosine: Thanks for the breakdown. The web repair is rather slow (another parameter that could've done with some tweaking...), so you might have just been dashing around a bit too quickly for it to have any noticeable effect.
@Daniel + Andrew: Agreed. Lesson learned for next LD: allow time for balancing game parameters.
@cornedor: Thanks!
Managed to get it to work on Firefox anyway but worked very slowly. Neat experiment.
Really cool but really laggy. Nice theme interpretation. Not a lot of gameplay and variety though.
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33 flies :)